Recent Edit News and Analysis

If you like the Forbes Technology Council, you'll like the newly announced Ad Age Collective. It's based on the same idea: paying an affordable annual fee for the right to publish content to a prestigious site and to enjoy additional benefits -- such as professional introductions and early-bird pricing to live events.

There aren't too many like Kathryn Bonesteel. She has worked in PR at agencies and in-house. At other times she worked as a legislative aide in the Texas House of Representatives, and in marketing for the Dallas Cowboys. And she's one of the sharpest pros we know when it comes to SEO and social analytics.

If you're looking for quick-and-dirty lists of top tech edit targets across 28 tech categories, you might be interested in Techmeme's new Topic Leaderboards. Created by Gabe Rivera in 2005, the original Techmeme Leaderboards tracked the clout of individual reporters and publications, and still do.

I’ve previously written about managing difficult clients and maintaining profitability - two daily challenges in the life of PR leadership. While these are critical to your everyday role, there’s another key factor that will help or hurt you while juggling the work: your team.

Five weeks and 61 meetings... we learned much on our now-concluded road trip. In short, clients and agencies need to talk more. From agencies we heard questions such as, "What if the client doesn't know what their story is?", and, "They won't let us talk about that."

Would someone please remind the B2B clients that Tier 2 doesn’t suck? One client ordered its agency to swarm Tier 1 pubs even though the client’s number one goal was lead-gen. Tier 2 readers may not sign the checks, but they build the short lists and recommend what to buy.

TechCrunch still covers funding rounds the old-fashioned way — with lots of full-fledged articles each day, each with their own style. No digests like Fortune’s and CNBC’s. Nothing half-hearted. Coverage ranges from seed round through Series E and F.

CNBC doesn’t profile many startups using 2,000 words and two team photos. But that’s what it did on Oct. 4 when Kate Rooney, a markets reporter, went deep on a startup called Plaid. It didn’t hurt Plaid’s cause that CNBC named it to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list. Still, it was singled out. Why?

Placing funding news used to be easier. Get the targets under embargo, schedule the interviews, hope no one misbehaves and watch the coverage roll in. You still have to do all that. But now there’s the issue of, “The round is only $50 million?” And/or, “I want an exclusive on this.” And/or, “I want a two-hour jump or I’m not covering it.”

Is the Forbes Technology Council worth the money? We hear that a lot from PR pros looking to place contributed content. In our view the answer is ‘yes’, though there’s actually something bigger going on, which we’ll get to in a sec.

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Journalists are leaving media brands every week. Read the fruits of 16 confidential interviews with journalists now working at tech brands or PR agencies, and five interviews with the executives who hired these journalists.